So What?

The word for the work one does with a needle, thread and cloth does not look like a comfortable thing to say or do. Sew. It always threw me when I was a kid and to this day when I am reading to myself I pronounce it like the past tense of flight. Sew.

Everything wants to separate and run amok despite a lot of tape and some pins. After this side is done, about 11 feet down the road, you have to turn the whole affair upside down and do it again. There was a guy on every sailing ship who sat on a bench and did this shit 14 hours a day every day of every very long and bouncy voyage.

But already I am bored with the part of the river  to which I have access and the parts farther downriver, with all the wild islands and salt marshes and sandy beaches seem like they would be worth the effort of going  down there in the dory. In 1992 I did just that, rowed my similar sized skiff down to Astoria. I had a wonderful time but I said to myself never again. I wound up with the most amazing strawberry blisters on the cheeks of the part I sit down on that took months to heal.
But I do love camping out in the wild places on the river.

One thing I know now that I was ignorant of back then is the extent of the flood current on the Lower Columbia once the rains stop and the dammers quit messing with reservoir levels. The flood current flows quite usefully strong for many hours each and every tide.
So if a person got down to the fun parts of the river around, say,  Tensillahe Island or the Prairie Channel and wanted to come home she might just be able to do that with patience and a careful reading of the tide tables. But it would be easier considerably if she had a little sprit sail rigged up to take advantage of the inevitable and inescapable sea-breeze that blows all summer long, which would theoretically scoot you right along on pretty much a dead run the whole time. You wouldn't even need a centerboard.

I disconnected the TV cable service back when I bought the sailboat, and I just got out of the habit of watching my $900 LCD HDTV. Which makes it a fairly expensive canvas rack. Actually I was delighted to have found a use for it.

The summer wind made itself painfully apparent as the days got hotter and the wind blew stronger  straight upriver very nearly 24 hours a day. Whether I wanted it to or not. There would be a bend in the river and I would think to myself "Oh boy it will be blowing acrossways now " but nooo, the wind bended too and there it was, dead against me there too, no matter the actual direction I was heading. It was almost personal. Every waking minute of the time it blew like a mad bastard and all I could do was to jog into it and let the current carry me toward my goal. Westbound.
And from Astoria I loaded up the skiff on its little trailer and drove back to Portland in an hour and a half.
Returning Eastbound, up-current,  in the dory, would very likely be a horse of a very different and possibly very interesting color. Under sail, that is, taking advantage of the flood current and the prevailing wind.
Which brings us to the present, and
New Sail Project Time.
My good pal  Maggi drove us out to the fabric depot last week and I came home eventually with 9 yards of 10 oz canvas duck and I got a book, Skiffs and Schooners by Pete Culler, an old-time shipwright and widgeon of the dockside that tells the old ways of small craft and I am lining out and beginning to produce a sprit sail for the dory. The canvas is very satisfying to work with, the smooth strong feel of it in the hand and the way the fat smooth needle pops through even 3 or 4 thicknesses of it, and it looks like I might have occupation for a fairly long winter agreeably employed and thoroughly amused.

The only place with enough open floor is outside my front door in the hall fortunately I live at the end of the ell so nobody has to walk past.  I measured a good many times before I cut the cloth, heart pounding with sheer terror . But it seems, so far, to be correctly laid out.

To top that off, Friday when I was climbing up to the bus stop out by the marina, where I had just finished winter-wrapping the dory in a 20 foot canvas tarpaulin bound in place with approximately a half a metric shit-ton of miscelaneous manila line and dacron tuna cord, there on the yellow line of highway 30 lay a full roll of hempen cordage twine. Methought, you know, I will need a bolt-rope for this sail and what better than to hand-make some rope out of this stuff. All rope amounts to little more than many strands of just such twine twisted together, and you can't really get high-quality manila any more. I've seen it made, and it isn't any big mystery.

Like Tom Sawyer I never do anything by half measures. I must make some rope. About a mile of it, apparently. The spool in the upper left is the "objet trouve"

They had more twine at the Third Eye joint over on hawthorn, and my big brother is making me a little cedar twisting device and I shall be happy to post some process photos when the time comes.